Private Data Objects: an Overview

Abstract

We present Private Data Objects (PDOs), a technology that enables mutually untrusted parties to run smart contracts over private data. PDOs result from the integration of a distributed ledger and Intel Secure Guard Extensions (SGX). In particular, contracts run off-ledger in secure enclaves using Intel SGX, which preserves data confidentiality, execution integrity and enforces data access policies (as opposed to raw data access). A distributed ledger verifies and records transactions produced by PDOs, in order to provide a single authoritative instance of such objects. This allows contracting parties to retrieve and check data related to contract and enclave instances, as well as to serialize and commit contract state updates. The design and the development of PDOs is an ongoing research effort, and open source code is available and hosted by Hyperledger Labs [5, 7].